Page 92 of Shadow Blind

Kait squared off against her husband, every muscle in her body tense, her eyes on fire. She drove her fingers into Cosky’s chest and yanked them loose when he grabbed them. “He’s dying, Marcus. It might be too late if I wait for the test results. I need to heal him now!”

Cosky stepped back, his face hardening. “We’re barreling down on the most dangerous op in years. We’re risking massive injuries. If you touch Aiden, Wolf will lock you in isolation alongside your brother until he knows for certain you’re not infected. He can’t chance you picking up the bots from Aiden and infecting the entire base. If you touch Aiden, you won’t be allowed to heal anyone else. For Christ’s sake, you’re the strongest healer the base has. What happens if I take a hit? Or Zane? Rawls? Mac? Fuck, what if Wolf goes down?”

Kait froze, her face twisting. She looked torn. “You said there would be no mission until you had a location on Aiden’s arms dealer.”

“Yeah…fuck.” Cosky ran a tense hand down his face. “The location came in this morning. Our strategy is set. The Thunderbird is fueled and the teams are decked out.” He swore again. “I was about to call you when Aiden went down.”

Kait’s face was so tight it looked skeletal. Her eyes turned glassy. “When do you leave?”

Cosky reached for her hand and lifted it to his lips. “I’m sorry, babe. I wish I could stay, but I’m needed. We can’t allow this weapon to deploy. We spin up at zero thirty.”

Kait swallowed hard and squared her shoulders. “Aiden would want you to go. He’d want you to stop what happened to his team from happening to anyone else.” Her face twisted. “Just make sure you come back. Promise me you’ll come back.”

Demi turned away, giving them privacy.

Poor Kait, she was facing losses in every direction. Her husband and both her brothers were at risk now. Because Wolf would be right there beside Cosky and the rest of his warriors, putting himself in danger to protect the world. The whole lot of them were heroes. It was hard to love a hero, let alone three of them.

Demi’s heart would have ached for her if it wasn’t numb with fear.

Chapter thirty-six

Day 17

Petropavlovsk, Russia

The Heemitia, full and round in her silver finery, glowed down on Wolf as he and his warriors snowshoed through skeletal thickets of birch and alder. The air was cold and dry. It burned down his throat and into his lungs. He and Aggress One were snowshoeing around the northeastern edge of Petropavlovsk. Thirty minutes earlier, Aggress Two had split off and headed north to the electrical pole at the entrance to their prey’s compound. There, they would cut the power. Then both teams would strike.

When the backup generator rumbled to life and the perimeter cameras came on, the aggress would be over, and their quarry, along with his ominous new weapon, would be theirs.

So stood the plan.

Their abrupt departure for the far east of Russia had proven beneficial. The Thunderbird had landed in the hills above Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky before the low-pressure ridge arrived. If the Shadow Warrior smiled upon them, they’d lift off with their quarry before the escalating winds and heavy snow settled over the area.

Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky was in the badlands of Russia. Why, in Hee-nes’s glory, would Kuznetsov hide out here in this remote town where he was sandwiched between the volcanoes of Kamchatka and Russia’s largest naval base? Where the only way in and out was by boat, plane, or helicopter.

Mackenzie wasn’t the only one who’d questioned Benioko’s knowledge. The elder gods in the Shadow Realm were the Taounaha’s standard source of information, and they did not offer physical proof. Yet the photos and videos provided by the Old One were physical. Concrete. And accurate.

Still, the location Kuznetsov had chosen seemed irrational. Why would the world’s most hunted arms dealer hide within the country of his exile? Perhaps because it was unlikely USSOCOM would risk the sleeping giant’s ire by sending a special ops team so deep into Russian territory. Besides, their prey had two means of escape. A chopper squatting in his bluff-side compound, and a massive, opulent yacht moored in Avacha Bay below. It was Wolf’s job to ensure Kuznetsov didn’t reach either.

At the edge of the tree line, next to the chain-link fence that surrounded Kuznetsov’s snow scraped compound, Wolf and his warriors shucked their snowshoes. They didn’t bother hooking them to their kits. They wouldn’t need them again as the thunderbird would lift them from the Russian’s doorstep.

On his belly beneath the scratchy, sparse branches of a dwarf Siberian pine, Wolf scanned the dark compound through his rifle’s scope. The wind had picked up. It howled through the trees, flinging needles and dead branches in every direction.

“Aggress Two, countdown to first mark?” Wolf asked into his comm.

“Five minutes to strike,” Tomas Beck, the team two leader, said over the comm.

Mark one was the electricity. They needed to bring down the security cameras. Beneath the infrared cameras, Wolf and his warriors would stand out like pulsing red flames on the camera feeds.

“Gotta say, boys,” a low, southern drawl whispered through Wolf’s headset. “It’s a damn good thing we included snowshoein’ in our PT. That would have been brutal if we weren’t used to it.”

Low grunts of agreement hit Wolf’s headset.

“The wind’s a bitch, though. Could do without that,” one of the former SEALs added softly, either Zane or Cosky. Wolf couldn’t tell them apart through the headset.

“Like I told y’all, this place is the ass crack of Russia,” that slow, southern drawl said. “Cold as a witch’s tit during a blizzard.”

A what?

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